Ehud's Dagger Class Struggle in the English Revolution

Seventeenth-century England saw the first capitalist revolution of the modern world, but also the first anti-capitalist revolution. In Ehud's Dagger , James Holstun reconstructs five radical projects of the time in a stirring development of Marxist 'history from below.' A Caroline prologue examines the political and poetic furor surrounding John Felton, who assassinated the Duke of Buckingham in 1628, creating a republican cause célèbre for circulators of verse libels. Holstun then turns to the Revolution proper, focusing on the common soldiers of the Puritan New Model Army, who formed a military soviet in the summer of 1647 and bested their capitalist officers in debate; the Fifth Monarchist visionary Anna Trapnel, who publicly prophesied against the Protectorate on behalf of sectarian small producers; the Leveller theorist and desperado Edward Sexby, who wrote the brilliant tyrannicidal treatise Killing Noe Murder, and attempted to assassinate Cromwell; and the agrarian communist Diggers of Surrey, whose comrade and leader Gerrard Winstanley was the foremost social theorist of seventeenth-century England.

James Holstun is the author of Rational Millennium: Puritan Utopias of Seventeenth-Century England and America and the editor of Pamphlet Wars: Prose in the English Revolution. He is Professor of English at the State University of New York, Buffalo.